Inspired by Latour’s (2005a) notion of matters of concern and M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III as a representation
of the Poincaré Disk, this study follows how an S&OP process was fabricated in a large Swedish
manufacturing company. The study claims that when actors are fabricating the S&OP process, local actors
create emergent, ongoing and multiple matters of concern around it. The group demand chain, the actor
who is responsible for guiding the implementation of the process, delegates the attempts to close these
matters of concern to local actors located in separate times and spaces. As a result, constituents of the
S&OP process are dispersed in diverse local times and spaces rather than being coordinated in a single time
and space by the group demand chain. Accounting is a set of matters of concern.
The S&OP process and its purpose of integration come from an “absolute nothingness” – its minimal
configuration ‐ because actors refer to them in their absences. They need to be re‐presented. The minimal
configuration of the S&OP process creates a working time/space where diverse actors are engaged to create
emergent properties of the S&OP process and new possibilities of integration. Consequently, as new matters
of concern are constantly created by actors, integration on the demand chain becomes uncertain because
actors are always creating new possibilities to move towards integration but will never arrive at the
destination of integration. The S&OP process and integration thus go back to the “absolute nothingness”
because as matters of concern they have no edge. To integrate is thus to postpone integration. In‐between
stands the constituents of the S&OP process and possibilities of integration dispersed in diverse times and
spaces. This means from this “absolute nothingness” lays the “geometry exactitude” of the managerial
technology. Accounting is a Poincaré Disk. Therefore accounting not only creates a presence what are
absent but also initiates a working time/space where actors can bring heterogeneous problematisation
upon itself. The impossibility of representation brings about possibility of heterogeneous
representational practices. Accounting makes the transition possible by artificially blurring the
distinction between absence and presence.

This paper discusses factors affecting the execution of supply chain management and
presents a conceptual model and six hypotheses based on such factors identified in the
literature. The model was tested in two European country-specific cases using structural
equation modelling. Findings in both cases confirm the hypothesized hierarchical order
of three proposed antecedents: ‘internal SCM conditions’ affect ‘joint SCM conditions’
which in turn influences collaborative ‘SCM-related processes’. Managerial
implications are that firms in both countries should adopt these hierarchical steps to
ensure a rigorous and appropriate approach to achieving full and integrative SCM.

We exploit a natural experiment in Denmark to investigate when forced sales lead to fire sale
discounts. Forced sales result from sudden deaths of house owners in an institutional environment in
which beneficiaries are forced to settle the estate, and hence sell the house, within 12 months. We
identify 6,329 forced sales by suddenly deceased house owners, and find that forced sales bring in lower
prices than do comparable houses as the deadline winds down: We find no discounts for sales long
before the deadline, and discounts of 12.5% for sales shortly before the deadline. Market conditions
and the urgency of the sale also affect the average discount: Discounts are larger when house prices
contract, in thin markets where demand is lower, and when the sale is more likely to be a fire sale
because of financial or liquidity constraints. Late fire sales are more likely when the house price is in the
loss domain suggesting that disposition effects play a role in explaining discounts. We establish these
results using (i) a hedonic pricing model, and (ii) the tax authorities’ yearly assessments of value as
benchmark for realized prices. Overall, our results characterize market conditions under which forced
sales lead to fire sale discounts.

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Although a strategy, in theory, should help the organization to move in the same
direction by showing a direction for the organization, in practice the strategy
increases the number of possible paths, as managers translate the strategy into their
own context. This increases the number of strategies in the organization, and it
becomes difficult to get an overview of the interaction and relationships between the
translated strategies.
The managers distinguish between the different parts of the strategy, such as the
abstract words or intention, and the concrete as targets and projects. Managers use
the various parts of the strategy in different contexts, but still speak about "strategy"
even if they have changed dimension like the words and KPIs.
Another dimension is that the managers also perceive the strategy as correct, but
irrelevant, which is linked to their distinction between the abstract and the concrete in
the strategy. The abstract dimension is perceived as being true, while the effet of the
strategy may be irrelevant for certain managers.
The strategy is also used as documentation for senior management intentions. This
allows other players to gain insight into top management's thinking, take
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countermeasures, resist in an elegant way, or just prepare to argue his case within
the logic of the strategy.

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In order to develop a harmonised and efficient IT system, such as a
database, it is important to be familiar with the underlying concept
model (concept systems) for the relevant domain which the IT system
should be designed to accommodate, as this forms the necessary firm
foundation for designing the conceptual data model. Although there is
no one-to-one correlation between concept and characteristic features
in the concept model and classes and attributes in the conceptual data
model, there are many similarities between concept modelling and
conceptual data modelling, and by closely examining the relationship
between the two models, we have strived to construct an algorithm for
creating conceptual data models in Unified Modelling Language
(UML) on the basis of concept models that adhere to the traditional
principles and methods of terminology work.

Despite ten years of direct regulation, our study of Danish lower secondary schools shows that they do not provide online access to the GPA for individual public schools (N=1,592). Using Lipsky’s gate-keeping theory, we investigate the lack of data provision as indicator not only of professionals’ being reluctant to accept imposed standards and control from central level (top-down) but also avoiding demands from parents (and children) on transparency and accountability (bottom-up). The lack of accessibility of grades on the web can thus be seen as a classical gate-keeping mechanism evolving in the age of information society where expectations of end-of-gatekeeping by providing accessibility and transparency using information systems has been outnumbered by classical forces of gate-keeping.

The exponentially growing production of data enables global connectivity as well as increased
openness and sharing, which turn into a powerful force that is changing the global economy and
society. Governments around the world have become active participants in this evolution by opening
up their data for access and re-use by public and private agents alike. The recent phenomenon of
Open Government Data (OGD) has spread around the world, driven by the proposition that opening
government data has the ability to generate both economic and social value. However, a review of the
academic research and the popular press reveals only sporadic attention given to various aspects with
no overarching framework that explains how OGD generates value. We apply a critical realist
approach to uncover the generative mechanisms that serve to explain this relationship. First, we
present a strategic framework with four archetypical generative mechanisms. The framework outlines
the different pathways to value generation and highlights the current tension between the
private/public and economic/social domains. Second, we offer a conceptual model that provides a
systematic way of articulating and examining further the generation of value from OGD.

There is a widely held view that a lack of, “…customer understanding,” is one of the
main reasons for product failure (Eliashberg et al., 1997, p. 219). This is despite the
fact that new product development (NPD) is a crucial business process for many
companies. The importance of integrating the voice of the customer (VoC) through
market research is well documented (Davis, 1993; Mullins and Sutherland, 1998;
Cooper et al., 2002; Flint, 2002; Davilla et al., 2006; Cooper and Edgett, 2008;
Cooper and Dreher, 2010; Goffin and Mitchell, 2010).
However, not all research methods are well received, for example there are
studies that have strongly criticized focus groups, interviews and surveys (e.g.
Ulwick, 2002; Goffin et al, 2010; Sandberg, 2002). In particular, a point is made that,
“…traditional market research and development approaches proved to be particularly
ill-suited to breakthrough products” (Deszca et al, 2010, p613). Therefore, in
situations where traditional techniques—interviews and focus groups—are
ineffective, the question is which market research techniques are appropriate,
particularly for developing breakthrough products? To investigate this, an attempt was
made to access the knowledge of market research practitioners from agencies with a
reputation for their work on breakthrough NPD. We were surprised to find that this
research had not been conducted previously.
In order to make it possible for the sample of 24 market research experts
identified for this study to share their knowledge, repertory grid technique was used.
This psychology based method particularly seeks out tacit knowledge by using indepth
interviews. In this case the interviews were conducted with professionals from
leading market research agencies in two countries. The resulting data provided two
unique insights: they highlighted the attributes of market research methods which
made them effective at identifying customers’ needs and they showed how different
methods were perceived against these attributes.
This article starts with a review of the literature on different methods for
conducting market research to identify customer needs. The conclusions from the
literature are then used to define the research question. We explain our choice of
methodology, including the data collection and analysis approach. Next the key
results are presented. Finally, the discussion section identifies the key insights,
clarifies the limitations of the research, suggests areas for future research, and draws
implications for managers.
We conclude that existing research is not aligned with regard to which
methods (or combination of methods) are best suited to the various stages of the NPD
process. We have set out the challenges and our own intended work in this regard in
our section on ‘further research’. Also, the existing literature does not explicitly seek
the perceptions of practitioner experts based in market research agencies. This we
have started to address, and we acknowledge that further work is required.
Although our research in ongoing, it has already yielded the first view of a
model of the perceptions of 24 expert market researchers in the UK and Denmark.
Based on the explanation of these experts, the model situates a derived set of
categories in a manner that reflects the way in which they are inter-linked. We believe
that our model begins to deal with the gaps and anomalies in the existing research into
VoC methods.

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In this exploratory study we take a strategic management approach to global sourcing of
advanced services. We discuss in which ways conventional sourcing differs from strategic
sourcing and what impels firms to aim for the latter (or, prevent them from doing so).
Potentially, strategic global sourcing of services has high returns, but is also associated with
high risks and needs for organizational changes. Strategic global sourcing may therefore be
outside firms’ “comfort zone” – a composite of organizational knowledge transferability,
structural inertia, managers’ risk preferences, and – most interesting in a strategic
management perspective ‐ their ability to mitigate risks of strategic global sourcing. One
important risk reducing measure is internalization of (out)sourced service activities. Many firms
instigate global sourcing via conventional offshore outsourcing. However, as the human asset
specificity of the outsourcing operation increases, firms are pulled out of their comfort zones
and a desire for internalization arises. An illustrative company case gives suggestions as to
how, in practice, internalization may be accomplished without losing valuable human assets
held by the local service providers.

In this exploratory study we take a strategic management approach to global sourcing of
advanced services. We discuss in which ways conventional sourcing differs from strategic
sourcing and what impels firms to aim for the latter (or, prevent them from doing so).
Potentially, strategic global sourcing of services has high returns, but is also associated with
high risks and needs for organizational changes. Strategic global sourcing may therefore be
outside firms’ “comfort zone” – a composite of organizational knowledge transferability,
structural inertia, managers’ risk preferences, and – most interesting in a strategic
management perspective ‐ their ability to mitigate risks of strategic global sourcing. One
important risk reducing measure is internalization of (out)sourced service activities. Many firms
instigate global sourcing via conventional offshore outsourcing. However, as the human asset
specificity of the outsourcing operation increases, firms are pulled out of their comfort zones
and a desire for internalization arises. An illustrative company case gives suggestions as to
how, in practice, internalization may be accomplished without losing valuable human assets
held by the local service providers.

This paper claims that technology and institutions both epitomize the construction
of artificial orders through which a primary reality is shaped to something
other than it is by logical operations that share essential affinities. Drawing on this, we
work our way to showing how technology operates as governing regime and how
tasks and operations that are carried out by the human enactment of expert rules and
procedures can considerably be embodied onto technological sequences with which
human experts have limited and severely structured interaction. These ideas are illustrated
by reference to cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, museums)
and the ways the deepening infiltration of their operations by computing technologies
redefines their goals and the skills, practices and arrangements through
which these goals have traditionally been pursued.

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Greenland is the largest island of the world. It is mostly covered by an ice cap, but with an ice free territory of the same size as the territory of Sweden and 8 times the territory of Denmark. The size of the population in Greenland has been stable since 1970’s and include 56.000 persons.
Until Second World War Greenland was an almost closed territory, you had to have a permission to go there, and only few permissions were given. The size of the population at that time was less than 4000.

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The Impact of the Global Economic and Financial Crises over Developing Countries' Automobile Industry

Wad, Peter(Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Abstract:

In the Global South automobile production evolved behind protectionist walls and was promoted by infant industry policies and outright national automotive projects from the 1950s. In recent decades, many developing countries have liberalized their automotive markets and allowed automobile TNCs to take majority control over joint ventures, transforming domestic automotive industries into foreign controlled sectors while leaving a few national automakers in India, Malaysia and China. Decomposing and reorganizing the national value chain into regional and global automobile value chains OEMs and TNC original equipment suppliers (OESs) have off-shored and outsourced component and parts production to developing countries. Again, local auto suppliers have been acquired or relegated to lower 'tier' positions if not forced out of the market. However, with economic growth and development in the Global South during the 1990s and 2000s automobile sales have boomed, and the automobile sectors in Latin America and Asia have become „brown sunrise‟ industries generating investment, technological upgrading and employment. The present global financial and economic crisis has not profoundly changed this trajectory. The global crisis did not impact automotive markets in developing countries severely, except for automotive exporting countries like Mexico, Thailand and South Africa. Only in 2009 automotive sales and production declined across the board in the Global South, but key markets turned around in the end of the year. Thus, the automobile crisis is a downward business cycle, not a structural crisis of the industry. Companies in the automotive industry responded with traditional crisis management (temporary downsizing, cost reductions, retraining, consolidation, innovation), and governments launched traditional stimuli packages (cash-for-clunkers, tax reductions on smaller and/or cleaner cars etc). Strategic initiatives were taken to improve the competitiveness of the domestic industry (consolidation, liberalization) on the one hand and to transform it from a brown industry to a „greener‟ industry on the other hand (tightening environmental regulations, fuel efficiency and emission standards, subsidizing purchases of smaller and „greener‟ cars, investing in appropriate infrastructure and green technology R&D). Thereby, some developing countries and their surviving local automakers and parts makers are leapfrogging into „clean‟ technology frontiers competing head-to-head with global automakers or partnering with foreign firms in their common endeavor to manufacture green automobiles.

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Technology driven industries have seen fast moving technology changes, higher complexity and reduced product life cycles. These emerging trends present challenges for companies in industries where technology is at the forefront. The extant research deals with ‘low-tech’
industries and majority of findings are not applicable to the high-tech industry; in fact this industry has many additional challenges. In this study, we aim to explore the process of M&A in the high-tech industry by drawing on extant literature and empirical field work. The paper outlines a research project in progress which intends to provide theoretical, empirical and practical contributions in answering the research question: what role does
Operations and IT play in creating value in high-tech M&As? The research adds a needed perspective on M&A literature by unveiling unique challenges and opportunities faced by the M&A teams in this sector. The phenomenon is studied from multiple perspectives: integration team, acquiring group and the company being acquired.

The aim of this research is to explore the managerial role of category managers in
purchasing. A network management perspective is adopted. A case based research
methodology is applied, and three category managers managing a diverse set of
component and service categories in a global production firm is observed while
providing accounts of their progress and results in meetings. We conclude that the
network management classification scheme originally developed by Harland and Knight
(2001) and Knight and Harland (2005) is a valuable and fertile theoretical framework
for the analysis of the role of the category manager in purchasing.

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An Examination of Government Policies and Company Initiatives in Denmark and the UK

Brown, Dana; Steen Kundsen, Jette(, 2012)

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Abstract:

The literature explains the link between CSR and domestic institutions in terms of the presence of national institutional complementarities as a key determinant of a company’s CSR initiatives. One set of explanations sees CSR as fitting in with domestic institutional structures as either `substituting’ or ‘mirroring’ government policies. A second set of explanations views CSR as driven by variations in competitive needs across countries, reflecting in particular the degree of international market exposure. Both sets of literature look at the level of CSR in companies from different countries. Focusing on the UK and Denmark we study the link between CSR and domestic institutions by examining the content of both government CSR policies and company CSR initiatives. We find that CSR can be a substitute for government regulation, but in contrast to
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existing literatures we show that this is more likely in the context of host countries rather than in home countries.

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A longitudinal study of the adoption of online interactive and social media by luxury fashion brands

Hansen, Rina(Turku, 2011)

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Abstract:

Most luxury fashion brands have yet to develop a clear and focused integrated online strategy, as they have struggled with the dilemma of interacting with fans and customers online. We observed how 35 luxury fashion brands utilized social and interactive online technologies since 2006 by formulating a framework for assessing fashion websites and brand controlled social media sites. Our findings illustrate that the observed luxury brands have increased their adoption of social and interactive digital technologies since 2006, and that with the help of Web 2.0 technologies fashion brands can create an immersing and innovative environment online.The findings also have relevance for practitioners, as the developed 8C framework can function as a checklist for fashion brand website creation.

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IT1 is likely to be as important to the way companies will organize
in the future as electricity was to the industrial revolution. IT will
revolutionize entire industries and markets. IT will create new
types of organizations that will surpass and outsmart traditional
organizations. This has been predicted for more than a decade.
But now it is happening especially in the music, newspaper and
publishing industries, and shall see it even more pronounced in
these sectors in the future. But it will not be limited to these
industries; it will influence all types of industry and government
organizations.
Already today, we see many examples of innovative
organizational designs, enhancing organizational effectiveness
and competitiveness.
The paper will briefly discuss the potential of future IT
developments, and will proceed to give a short theoretical
background for why we see a growth in IT-facilitated new
organizational forms. A couple of interesting organizational
design will be mentioned, before we proceed to making the
argument that any business process in principle may be
reengineered, centralized or outsourced in one way or other.
Interesting examples will be presented.
We suggest that future IT will have such a profound impact on
organizational structure going far beyond the traditional ‘virtual
organization’ that it calls for a new organizational concept, which
we have chosen to label the “Ambient Organization’.